The White House Visitors Center National Park Service
Can't Get Tickets to the White House Tour? Try This Instead.
A new museum showcases some historical gems.
Washingtonians and visitors will have a new museum option on Sept. 13 with the reopening of the newly refurbished White House Visitors Center.
Inside the Malcolm Baldrige room of the Commerce Department Building on Pennsylvania Avenue are nearly 100 artifacts, many never before displayed, according to Stewart McLaurin, president of the White House Historical Association, who gave Government Executive an advance tour.
At no charge, you’ll see the telegraph key from which President Lincoln got word of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender, the gold eagle finial that was atop the White House for a century, the desk Franklin D. Roosevelt used to deliver fireside chats, and a preserved section of a tree planted by John Quincy Adams.
The “contemporary, modern exhibits are highly interactive, and removable for updates,” McLaurin said while pointing out the push-button displays on political and family life in the surrounding President’s Park. There’s also a state-of-the-art theater and rolling film clips on topics such as the first ladies.
The 16,000-square foot complex also boasts new energy-efficient lighting.
The original White House Visitors Center opened in 1995 in this same vaulted room that was used as part of the Patent Search room in the 1930s and as headquarters for the Bicentennial celebration in 1976. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the National Park Service stopped handing out tickets for the official White House tour (they’re now obtainable only through members of Congress and embassies), and so the Visitors Center took on more of an educational mission.
To carry out its role in operating the center, the Park Service on Sept. 5 named John Stanwich as Park Service liaison to the White House.
The $12.6 million for the renovation, which include a $ 5 million endowment, was raised by the private White House Historical Association, which has offices on Lafayette Square. “We in Washington take it for granted,” McLaurin said, but the new center “is a way to see things you don’t see even if you go to the White House.”